It's also important to note that most (possibly all, but I'm certain of "most") Scandinavian countries have the same laws. Unless it's flavoured vodka, stick to Polish and Russian brands actually manufactured in Poland and Russia. A lot of American vodkas have Russian names, there's a reason why most of them are on the bottom shelf. Stolichnaya's cheap enough that you shouldn't be saving money by buying Kentucky "Kamchatka" or "Crystal Palace" swill.
First off, would it really kill an editor (or god forbid, a submitter) to google something first to see if it really is a new idea? The College Bar database has been doing this for years, and I know it's not the first.
Which brings me to why I replied to this post - no. There are certain ingredients that play off each other well, and those which don't.
The biggest problem with the default College Bar database was that it was full of garbage just like you're proposing - "hey, put this in and this in and this in and give it a funny name" that someone submitted after they "invented it" in their dorm room. Many of these so-called drinks were useless crap you'd never want to drink, and had the gimmick of weird ingredients, easy ingredients, many ingredients, a stupid name, and/or some "stunt" involved.
While you are certainly welcome to mix Midori, Limoncello, Pepto Bismol, Jagermeister, Faygo Red Pop and Bailey's into a glass and call it a drink, the fact is that nobody over 25 or with any taste whatsoever gives a shit about your nasty frat boy drink. There's a reason why only 20-something girls who are desperate for attention consume drinks with "sexy" names like Blowjobs, Sex on the Beach, or a Slippery Bald Beaver. These are drinks for little whores, not adults.
This isn't to say people have to agree about what constitutes a good drink - I prefer a martini shaken, not stirred, but if it has anything other than gin, vermouth, and some sort of garnish in it (and possibly a bit of bitters if you're trying to re-invent the wheel), don't call it a martini. Note I didn't say don't drink it, I'm just sick of "martini" drinks like choclatetini and appletini which are the exact opposite of what a martini actually is, sweet versus dry, syrupy instead of thin, etc. I also want no part of anything with Kahluah in it, but other reasonable people may thoroughly enjoy a White Russian.
The first thing I had to do was delete all the frat, gimmick, and whore drinks from the College Bar. Eventually, I just populated College Bar with my own database from a well-loved cocktail book that I had lying around. It was useful when you wanted to try something you hadn't had before, hadn't considered the possibilities of a particular ingredient, but didn't want to resort to awful crap you get when college kids make "drinks" whose primary goal is to taste like Coca Cola, fruit juice, or the sort of get-drunk-immediately swill created by people who consider Bacardi shots an actual drink instead of a stunt.
Neither of your points are valid. Since Apple is doing the configuration outlays that Apple is offering, whether a third party would have to take it apart and put it together right isn't relevant.
The cost for Apple to upgrade a given component should be equal or less than the cost difference between the base and upgraded product if the consumer were to buy it at retail, as the OEM is getting better prices. Yes, there's a need to build in a profit for upgrades, but a $500 upgrade price for a component upgrade whose street price difference is $112? That's offensive.
Unless of course you're suggesting that Apple is making all the mac minis exactly alike, and then disassembling the ones that customers get upgraded options on.
I've played with the Apple store Mac configuration tool any number of times, and the upgrade prices are preposterous. They are utterly divorced from reality, and it makes them look very bad - if you're charging five times the cost differential between hard drive A and hard drive B, you get the sneaking suspicion—probably accurate—that their initial prices for peripherals are similarly rapacious.
Take the $700 Mac mini. Set aside that it is overpriced, for the moment, since some people will pay more for the fact that it is designed well, and that they want to use MacOS.
Processor Included: 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Upgrade: 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo [Add $150.00]
Newegg: Difficult to give a precise comparison, but consider that the price difference between the 2.4GHz (P8600) and 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo (P9600) is $120. This is retail pricing, and not what an OEM like Apple would be paying.
Newegg: 2x 1GB DDR3 1066MHz SDRAM: Starting at $27.98 2x 2GB DDR3 1066MHz SDRAM: Starting at $49.98 [Add $22] 2x 4GB DDR3 1066MHz SDRAM: Starting at $139.98 [Add $112]
-----
Hard drive: Included: 320GB Serial ATA Drive Upgrade: 500GB Serial ATA Drive [Add $100.00]
Newegg: HITACHI Travelstar 7K500 HTE725032A9A364 320GB 7200 RPM 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive $59.99 (this is the exact drive in the default setup, which I feel is the fairest way to go as I don't want to compare it to a drive whose vertical clearance might be slightly different) HITACHI Travelstar 5K500.B HTS545050B9A300 (0A57915) 500GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive $59.99 [Add $0.00]
I'm told this faster drive also works: Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive $64.99 [Add $5.00]
As well as this larger, faster drive: Seagate Momentus ST9750420AS 750GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive $109.99 [Add $50]
-----
I don't mean to be "that guy", because I appreciate why some people prefer Apple, and they make some hardware that, if prices were less insane, I would be interested in, but their prices on upgrades is punitive to say the least.
Terrible, terrible and juvenile summary.
on
New IE Zero Day
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If you felt the story was newsworthy, I have no doubt that it was submitted in a form that was better than this one, or that you could have re-wrote it.
...make it the "most expensive" object in its class is more of an art stunt than a technology stunt, and a fairly unimaginative one at that. The $2.3million television is $2.3 million because it has $2.3 million worth of diamonds on it - the actual price of the television without the diamonds doesn't even change the rounding.
At what point in time is this more about the diamonds than the fact that they may or may not be attached to a gadget?
Answer: The initial concept.
It's kind of like the "most expensive pizza" being so because it's covered in luxury foods like rare caviar and then topped off with gold flakes. It's more art project than food.
There have been other studies that have shown that the placebo effect works better when people are aware of the placebo effect, and others which have demonstrated that it works better not only when people are aware of it, but when they're aware of the placebo effect and know they're taking one. So, effectively, the same sort of study as this.
Just because it's a new idea to you doesn't mean it's new, trivial, or hardly worth mentioning.
The key thing you said there is "do justice to whatever topic about which you're talking". 10 or 57, I don't think either one of us would argue that this article did justice to the topic. For writing as poor as this, 10 would have been no more arbitrary than 57.
As an asymmetrically limbed hunchback with a torso tentacled person who likes to save on electricity by keeping the heat down, I must respectfully disagree.
...that way the article could have included itself as number one. Another meandering, poorly written summary of the year.
If you're going to choose an arbitrary number to attach to an end of year list, keep it to ten and focus on the writing. Seriously, 57? I'm reminded of the Jargon File comment about 17 being the "least random number". This is just a blatant excuse to generate ads by breaking up an article; I'm surprised it isn't 57 pages long, in slide show form.
Do you mean to tell me that a TI calculator is "very powerful" compared to a smartphone, when TI's designs haven't changed notably in twenty years?
Compared to a smart phone, a TI calculator loses on so many fronts, including the three most important: CPU power, RAM, and display. I have little doubt that playing Angry Birds on an Android device or an iPhone generates more mathematical operations in five minutes of play than the TI graphing calculator I used in high school (and which is still being made twenty years later) ever performed in its entire lifespan.
Once TI secured a position as the industry leader for the "you have to buy this specific series and brand of calculator to take this class" market, innovation stopped. There is no reason why, for example, the "TI-Nspire CAS with Touchpad" should cost $145.35 (Amazon), or that the TI-86 should cost $142, and not have a color screen, a touchpad, programmable buttons, wi-fi for software updates, etc.
I realize a graphing calculator is not contractually obligated to be a smartphone, but the product wasn't so good 20 years ago that all real development should have stopped. TI's scientific and statistical calculator market share is waiting for an Android tablet or iPad app to come along and render it completely irrelevant.
Wikileaks stories need a category and an identifying icon, as updates are becoming much more frequent. If someone wants to use this to ignore wikileaks updates because they are apolitical and short-sighted, that's their problem—let them. Preferably the icon could be something other than Julain Assange or the wikileaks logo. Ideas?
I wasn't responding to the case. I was responding to your post:
> Your view might be different if it was your IT department, or your pay and leave records being dinked with...
> If the penalty is a slap on the wrist, what's the deterrent?
RE "Victim's Impact Statements", yes, I object very strongly to them. This "Victim's Rights" movement is nonsense. It's not the victims who are on trial, it's the defendant. I understand why a victim desires a harsh, punitive sentence, but I think a judge and jury have a better chance of getting it right.
Not that there aren't fundamental problems in our legal system. Let me bore you sometime about how traffic courts have become an immoral revenue generation scam in most jurisdictions.
My point is that you are convicted by a jury of your peers and not a jury of your victims for a good reason; a jury and a judge have a better ability to be dispassionate.
That we involve victims in sentencing hearings is abominable, as is that we enforce arbitrary minimum sentencing regulations.
If I am guilty of a crime, what I did is what should matter, not how good or bad a person the victim was. Rather than go down Hypothetical Alley with you about the value of human life, I'd like to keep our hypothetical closer to the facts:
Would this crime be more heinous "your IT department", as you put it, were genuinely good people? Would it worth less sentencing if it took place at an equivalent organization whose IT staff was lazy and whose managers were bombastic annoying pricks? Surely not. In that case, your opinions as the victim as to what the guilty party deserves regarding sentencing are too compromised.
In console gaming, these multiplayer experiences are a key selling point, yet this is tied to a monthly subscription fee - $60 a year (or more if you pay monthly) for Xbox Live Gold. The multiplayer experience is either crippled or unavailable if you don't have a subscription, but now the multiplayer experience is the only one that matters? I'm sure the driving point is that EA wants in on a monthly subscription model for a larger portion of its games, be it PC or console.
In PC gaming, I've seen these multiplayer blinders ruin games. Take the Civilization series; if you like the multiplayer game and short games, you can make the case that the series has been steadily improving. If you like truly vast, epic games and don't care about the multiplayer experience, every game in the series since Civ 2 (and Alpha Centauri) has ratcheted back from the ability to play vast maps and control dozens if not hundreds of cities. Not the option, but the ability!
In other games, multiplayer and single-player are so vastly different that one often feels like something tacked on at the last moment to help it "market" better. Let a game be what it's best at. Not every game has to be a casual multiplayer party game, or a single-player game with 120 hours of gameplay.
1 - There are more artists with record contracts than any time in recorded history. The barrier to entry for artists with recording contracts is lower because the barrier to running a label or a studio is lower.
2 - The license itself is the bad thing. If copyright law were limited to five years, most artists and labels wouldn't notice much difference - most of the profits on any given recording are made within five years. Furthermore, not everyone is enamoured of the GNU license, and it is not an obvious-good that you seem to think it is. I've had to re-invent the wheel a few times because the GNU license for the sources I would have otherwise wnated to use simply would have added an inappropriate burden for a project that wasn't even going to make money; adhering to the GNU contamination was burden enough. It has its place, but not every license is a good license for every project. The "pay a bunch of middlemen 95% of the album's profits" isn't a good license, either.
3 - Now you're arguing against yourself. In your GNU-centric world, "you professionals" wouldn't be paid a lot for certain tasks. Also, artists aren't paid a lot right now, as media publishers have turned copyright from being a tool to protect the public domain by ensuring that a nation's culture is fully available to it, into a scheme which accomplishes the exact opposite - ensuring that a nation doesn't have access to its culture. US copyright law wasn't created to protect the wealthy at the expense of the public interest and up-and-coming artists of all stripe, but that's all it's for now.
While I do buy music, I tend to buy it at shows where it is common for artists to keep the majority of the profits. This isn't a perfect solution, as I'll be the first to admit, and as anyone who listens to artists who don't actively tour knows. As it stands, copyright law is morally bankrupt, so I don't see how morality applies to your decision to adhere to it or not.
People should be paid for their work, but some work is more valuable than others. What is most important to you with regards to your favorite artist? The artist, or the record label who promotes and "discovers" them? While the latter has some value, the portion of the profits that the record labels have historically received is way out of line with the value of the service. Today, a strong major label is less important than ever to the "gatekeeper" function that it traditionally performed. There are more ways to discover music, and an extremely segmented and niche-centric marketplace makes that function a lot more appropriate to music journalism (professional and amateur) than whether a bunch of people at a record label think it will sell a million copies.
Even the record labels know this, which is why they create or purchase smaller labels with a more focused sound. There's no such thing as a "Universal sound", a "Warner sound" or a "Sony sound". Their role as gatekeepers isn't a valuable one, or if you disagree with me about that, it's certainly a [i]less[/i] valuable one than it ever has been. What better reason to re-balance the profit equation more in favor of the artists!
My mistake, I did mis-remember the timeline. There was, though, a lot of fishing around for the disaffected Clinton supporters who, when faced between a choice between a female Democrat and a male Democrat who defeated her were pretty much willing to shout and yell about how they'd rather elect McCain than someone who had the audacity to "steal" the nomination from her. She was being treated by the press as the heir-apparent before Obama surged ahead.
This is my suspicion only, but I think Palin's nomination was still a reaction to Clinton, and that McCain's advisors probably made more out of the so-called "grey panthers" than they should have. It's one thing to slam Obama in the waning days of the Clinton campaign before she conceded, or in their bitterness after the concession, but it's quite another to vote for a hawkish candidate who was walking away from campaign finance reform that he had long ago championed and who was getting into bed with social conservatives to "rally the base" in the privacy of an actual voting booth.
Because the Clinton candidacy was strong when he chose Palin, and McCain assumed (with good reason) that if Clinton got the Democratic nomination that the election would end up being about opening up a new era of equality in politics with regards to female candidates. By making Palin his running mate he got a physically attractive woman on the ticket who I presume he thought would make the election less about whether women were qualified to be President (and who would want to be on the wrong side of that historical judgement?) and more about whether you wanted to guarantee the "old guard" of women Democrats a place at the table or whether you wanted some eye candy in a politician who presumably had a decent future ahead of her.
I have no doubt that he kicked himself not for picking a woman running mate, but rather picking an idiot running mate with delusions of stardom. Then, instead of the election being about whether it was time for a female on the ticket, it became about whether America was ready for a person with a different racial background as President. He not only brought a knife to a gun fight, but it was a spectacularly dull knife.
Slashdot Mirror
...then they shouldn't have gotten arrested.
It'll cost you some DNA testing to be sure.
It's also important to note that most (possibly all, but I'm certain of "most") Scandinavian countries have the same laws. Unless it's flavoured vodka, stick to Polish and Russian brands actually manufactured in Poland and Russia. A lot of American vodkas have Russian names, there's a reason why most of them are on the bottom shelf. Stolichnaya's cheap enough that you shouldn't be saving money by buying Kentucky "Kamchatka" or "Crystal Palace" swill.
First off, would it really kill an editor (or god forbid, a submitter) to google something first to see if it really is a new idea? The College Bar database has been doing this for years, and I know it's not the first.
Which brings me to why I replied to this post - no. There are certain ingredients that play off each other well, and those which don't.
The biggest problem with the default College Bar database was that it was full of garbage just like you're proposing - "hey, put this in and this in and this in and give it a funny name" that someone submitted after they "invented it" in their dorm room. Many of these so-called drinks were useless crap you'd never want to drink, and had the gimmick of weird ingredients, easy ingredients, many ingredients, a stupid name, and/or some "stunt" involved.
While you are certainly welcome to mix Midori, Limoncello, Pepto Bismol, Jagermeister, Faygo Red Pop and Bailey's into a glass and call it a drink, the fact is that nobody over 25 or with any taste whatsoever gives a shit about your nasty frat boy drink. There's a reason why only 20-something girls who are desperate for attention consume drinks with "sexy" names like Blowjobs, Sex on the Beach, or a Slippery Bald Beaver. These are drinks for little whores, not adults.
This isn't to say people have to agree about what constitutes a good drink - I prefer a martini shaken, not stirred, but if it has anything other than gin, vermouth, and some sort of garnish in it (and possibly a bit of bitters if you're trying to re-invent the wheel), don't call it a martini. Note I didn't say don't drink it, I'm just sick of "martini" drinks like choclatetini and appletini which are the exact opposite of what a martini actually is, sweet versus dry, syrupy instead of thin, etc. I also want no part of anything with Kahluah in it, but other reasonable people may thoroughly enjoy a White Russian.
The first thing I had to do was delete all the frat, gimmick, and whore drinks from the College Bar. Eventually, I just populated College Bar with my own database from a well-loved cocktail book that I had lying around. It was useful when you wanted to try something you hadn't had before, hadn't considered the possibilities of a particular ingredient, but didn't want to resort to awful crap you get when college kids make "drinks" whose primary goal is to taste like Coca Cola, fruit juice, or the sort of get-drunk-immediately swill created by people who consider Bacardi shots an actual drink instead of a stunt.
That's a service I can provide to you, if it would add value for you. Let's talk.
Neither of your points are valid. Since Apple is doing the configuration outlays that Apple is offering, whether a third party would have to take it apart and put it together right isn't relevant.
The cost for Apple to upgrade a given component should be equal or less than the cost difference between the base and upgraded product if the consumer were to buy it at retail, as the OEM is getting better prices. Yes, there's a need to build in a profit for upgrades, but a $500 upgrade price for a component upgrade whose street price difference is $112? That's offensive.
Unless of course you're suggesting that Apple is making all the mac minis exactly alike, and then disassembling the ones that customers get upgraded options on.
I've played with the Apple store Mac configuration tool any number of times, and the upgrade prices are preposterous. They are utterly divorced from reality, and it makes them look very bad - if you're charging five times the cost differential between hard drive A and hard drive B, you get the sneaking suspicion—probably accurate—that their initial prices for peripherals are similarly rapacious.
Take the $700 Mac mini. Set aside that it is overpriced, for the moment, since some people will pay more for the fact that it is designed well, and that they want to use MacOS.
Processor
Included: 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Upgrade: 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo [Add $150.00]
Newegg: Difficult to give a precise comparison, but consider that the price difference between the 2.4GHz (P8600) and 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo (P9600) is $120. This is retail pricing, and not what an OEM like Apple would be paying.
-----
RAM:
Included: 2GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x1GB
Upgrade: 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x2GB [Add $100.00]
Upgrade: 8GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x4GB [Add $500.00]
Newegg:
2x 1GB DDR3 1066MHz SDRAM: Starting at $27.98
2x 2GB DDR3 1066MHz SDRAM: Starting at $49.98 [Add $22]
2x 4GB DDR3 1066MHz SDRAM: Starting at $139.98 [Add $112]
-----
Hard drive:
Included: 320GB Serial ATA Drive
Upgrade: 500GB Serial ATA Drive [Add $100.00]
Newegg:
HITACHI Travelstar 7K500 HTE725032A9A364 320GB 7200 RPM 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive $59.99 (this is the exact drive in the default setup, which I feel is the fairest way to go as I don't want to compare it to a drive whose vertical clearance might be slightly different)
HITACHI Travelstar 5K500.B HTS545050B9A300 (0A57915) 500GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive $59.99 [Add $0.00]
I'm told this faster drive also works:
Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive $64.99 [Add $5.00]
As well as this larger, faster drive:
Seagate Momentus ST9750420AS 750GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive $109.99 [Add $50]
-----
I don't mean to be "that guy", because I appreciate why some people prefer Apple, and they make some hardware that, if prices were less insane, I would be interested in, but their prices on upgrades is punitive to say the least.
But can you war-dial with it?
If you felt the story was newsworthy, I have no doubt that it was submitted in a form that was better than this one, or that you could have re-wrote it.
...make it the "most expensive" object in its class is more of an art stunt than a technology stunt, and a fairly unimaginative one at that. The $2.3million television is $2.3 million because it has $2.3 million worth of diamonds on it - the actual price of the television without the diamonds doesn't even change the rounding.
At what point in time is this more about the diamonds than the fact that they may or may not be attached to a gadget?
Answer: The initial concept.
It's kind of like the "most expensive pizza" being so because it's covered in luxury foods like rare caviar and then topped off with gold flakes. It's more art project than food.
There have been other studies that have shown that the placebo effect works better when people are aware of the placebo effect, and others which have demonstrated that it works better not only when people are aware of it, but when they're aware of the placebo effect and know they're taking one. So, effectively, the same sort of study as this.
Just because it's a new idea to you doesn't mean it's new, trivial, or hardly worth mentioning.
The key thing you said there is "do justice to whatever topic about which you're talking". 10 or 57, I don't think either one of us would argue that this article did justice to the topic. For writing as poor as this, 10 would have been no more arbitrary than 57.
As an asymmetrically limbed hunchback with a torso tentacled person who likes to save on electricity by keeping the heat down, I must respectfully disagree.
...that way the article could have included itself as number one. Another meandering, poorly written summary of the year.
If you're going to choose an arbitrary number to attach to an end of year list, keep it to ten and focus on the writing. Seriously, 57? I'm reminded of the Jargon File comment about 17 being the "least random number". This is just a blatant excuse to generate ads by breaking up an article; I'm surprised it isn't 57 pages long, in slide show form.
Do you mean to tell me that a TI calculator is "very powerful" compared to a smartphone, when TI's designs haven't changed notably in twenty years?
Compared to a smart phone, a TI calculator loses on so many fronts, including the three most important: CPU power, RAM, and display. I have little doubt that playing Angry Birds on an Android device or an iPhone generates more mathematical operations in five minutes of play than the TI graphing calculator I used in high school (and which is still being made twenty years later) ever performed in its entire lifespan.
Once TI secured a position as the industry leader for the "you have to buy this specific series and brand of calculator to take this class" market, innovation stopped. There is no reason why, for example, the "TI-Nspire CAS with Touchpad" should cost $145.35 (Amazon), or that the TI-86 should cost $142, and not have a color screen, a touchpad, programmable buttons, wi-fi for software updates, etc.
I realize a graphing calculator is not contractually obligated to be a smartphone, but the product wasn't so good 20 years ago that all real development should have stopped. TI's scientific and statistical calculator market share is waiting for an Android tablet or iPad app to come along and render it completely irrelevant.
Wikileaks stories need a category and an identifying icon, as updates are becoming much more frequent. If someone wants to use this to ignore wikileaks updates because they are apolitical and short-sighted, that's their problem—let them. Preferably the icon could be something other than Julain Assange or the wikileaks logo. Ideas?
She'd probably say the same heartfelt emotional stuff every other mother says during these fiascos, and I sympathize.
But a sentencing hearing or a jury trial isn't a good place to rely on one's emotions rather than facts.
I wasn't responding to the case. I was responding to your post:
> Your view might be different if it was your IT department, or your pay and leave records being dinked with...
> If the penalty is a slap on the wrist, what's the deterrent?
RE "Victim's Impact Statements", yes, I object very strongly to them. This "Victim's Rights" movement is nonsense. It's not the victims who are on trial, it's the defendant. I understand why a victim desires a harsh, punitive sentence, but I think a judge and jury have a better chance of getting it right.
Not that there aren't fundamental problems in our legal system. Let me bore you sometime about how traffic courts have become an immoral revenue generation scam in most jurisdictions.
My point is that you are convicted by a jury of your peers and not a jury of your victims for a good reason; a jury and a judge have a better ability to be dispassionate.
That we involve victims in sentencing hearings is abominable, as is that we enforce arbitrary minimum sentencing regulations.
If I am guilty of a crime, what I did is what should matter, not how good or bad a person the victim was. Rather than go down Hypothetical Alley with you about the value of human life, I'd like to keep our hypothetical closer to the facts:
Would this crime be more heinous "your IT department", as you put it, were genuinely good people? Would it worth less sentencing if it took place at an equivalent organization whose IT staff was lazy and whose managers were bombastic annoying pricks? Surely not. In that case, your opinions as the victim as to what the guilty party deserves regarding sentencing are too compromised.
You make a good case for not involving the victims in sentencing.
The prics of stupidity are going to have a field day with this one.
In console gaming, these multiplayer experiences are a key selling point, yet this is tied to a monthly subscription fee - $60 a year (or more if you pay monthly) for Xbox Live Gold. The multiplayer experience is either crippled or unavailable if you don't have a subscription, but now the multiplayer experience is the only one that matters? I'm sure the driving point is that EA wants in on a monthly subscription model for a larger portion of its games, be it PC or console.
In PC gaming, I've seen these multiplayer blinders ruin games. Take the Civilization series; if you like the multiplayer game and short games, you can make the case that the series has been steadily improving. If you like truly vast, epic games and don't care about the multiplayer experience, every game in the series since Civ 2 (and Alpha Centauri) has ratcheted back from the ability to play vast maps and control dozens if not hundreds of cities. Not the option, but the ability!
In other games, multiplayer and single-player are so vastly different that one often feels like something tacked on at the last moment to help it "market" better. Let a game be what it's best at. Not every game has to be a casual multiplayer party game, or a single-player game with 120 hours of gameplay.
1 - There are more artists with record contracts than any time in recorded history. The barrier to entry for artists with recording contracts is lower because the barrier to running a label or a studio is lower.
2 - The license itself is the bad thing. If copyright law were limited to five years, most artists and labels wouldn't notice much difference - most of the profits on any given recording are made within five years. Furthermore, not everyone is enamoured of the GNU license, and it is not an obvious-good that you seem to think it is. I've had to re-invent the wheel a few times because the GNU license for the sources I would have otherwise wnated to use simply would have added an inappropriate burden for a project that wasn't even going to make money; adhering to the GNU contamination was burden enough. It has its place, but not every license is a good license for every project. The "pay a bunch of middlemen 95% of the album's profits" isn't a good license, either.
3 - Now you're arguing against yourself. In your GNU-centric world, "you professionals" wouldn't be paid a lot for certain tasks. Also, artists aren't paid a lot right now, as media publishers have turned copyright from being a tool to protect the public domain by ensuring that a nation's culture is fully available to it, into a scheme which accomplishes the exact opposite - ensuring that a nation doesn't have access to its culture. US copyright law wasn't created to protect the wealthy at the expense of the public interest and up-and-coming artists of all stripe, but that's all it's for now.
While I do buy music, I tend to buy it at shows where it is common for artists to keep the majority of the profits. This isn't a perfect solution, as I'll be the first to admit, and as anyone who listens to artists who don't actively tour knows. As it stands, copyright law is morally bankrupt, so I don't see how morality applies to your decision to adhere to it or not.
People should be paid for their work, but some work is more valuable than others. What is most important to you with regards to your favorite artist? The artist, or the record label who promotes and "discovers" them? While the latter has some value, the portion of the profits that the record labels have historically received is way out of line with the value of the service. Today, a strong major label is less important than ever to the "gatekeeper" function that it traditionally performed. There are more ways to discover music, and an extremely segmented and niche-centric marketplace makes that function a lot more appropriate to music journalism (professional and amateur) than whether a bunch of people at a record label think it will sell a million copies.
Even the record labels know this, which is why they create or purchase smaller labels with a more focused sound. There's no such thing as a "Universal sound", a "Warner sound" or a "Sony sound". Their role as gatekeepers isn't a valuable one, or if you disagree with me about that, it's certainly a [i]less[/i] valuable one than it ever has been. What better reason to re-balance the profit equation more in favor of the artists!
My mistake, I did mis-remember the timeline. There was, though, a lot of fishing around for the disaffected Clinton supporters who, when faced between a choice between a female Democrat and a male Democrat who defeated her were pretty much willing to shout and yell about how they'd rather elect McCain than someone who had the audacity to "steal" the nomination from her. She was being treated by the press as the heir-apparent before Obama surged ahead.
This is my suspicion only, but I think Palin's nomination was still a reaction to Clinton, and that McCain's advisors probably made more out of the so-called "grey panthers" than they should have. It's one thing to slam Obama in the waning days of the Clinton campaign before she conceded, or in their bitterness after the concession, but it's quite another to vote for a hawkish candidate who was walking away from campaign finance reform that he had long ago championed and who was getting into bed with social conservatives to "rally the base" in the privacy of an actual voting booth.
Because the Clinton candidacy was strong when he chose Palin, and McCain assumed (with good reason) that if Clinton got the Democratic nomination that the election would end up being about opening up a new era of equality in politics with regards to female candidates. By making Palin his running mate he got a physically attractive woman on the ticket who I presume he thought would make the election less about whether women were qualified to be President (and who would want to be on the wrong side of that historical judgement?) and more about whether you wanted to guarantee the "old guard" of women Democrats a place at the table or whether you wanted some eye candy in a politician who presumably had a decent future ahead of her.
I have no doubt that he kicked himself not for picking a woman running mate, but rather picking an idiot running mate with delusions of stardom. Then, instead of the election being about whether it was time for a female on the ticket, it became about whether America was ready for a person with a different racial background as President. He not only brought a knife to a gun fight, but it was a spectacularly dull knife.